Word: whir
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Inside the plant, pop music throbs from loudspeakers while a multinational collection of American, West German, British and Japanese machines turn out 6,000,000 zippers a month. The machines whir under the usually watchful eyes of long-haired young men who are paid $66.25 a week and, as one of them puts it, "all the ale we can sink." All men employees wear Y.K.K.'s jackets, which have the company initials proudly displayed on the breast pocket and no fewer than six zippers on the front, the pockets and the cuffs...
...some of these reflexes are as unreliable as they are automatic. One such automatic reflex is the assumption that any hit play of the past can be transformed into a successful musical. The process goes like this: chop the original text into fragments, toss in songs and dances, and whir everything together at the pace of a Waring blender. The resulting concoction blandly eludes taste, flavor or identity...
When in warning. God's archangels whir...
...computer. Cram it with the names, telephone numbers and demographic particulars of a million or so voters. Feed in recorded messages by the candidate, slanting each pitch to appeal to a different ethnic or social group. Plug in a bank of telephones. Push a few buttons. And bleep, whir, dingaling, the machines tirelessly canvass the constituency with "personalized" calls (TIME...
Ferried out to the spill on small landing craft, four lickers extended their long, conveyor belt "tongues" to the oil. A whir of machinery, and the absorbent material on the belt spun into the oil and sopped it up. Heavy rollers at the end of the conveyors then squeezed out the oil into 45-gallon drums. In ten weeks about 200,000 gallons of oil had been lapped up. The licker is doubly effective because its conveyor belt is coated with oil prior to deployment. The result is that the tongue repels surrounding water and gobbles up only...